Illiberal Democracy: The End of History

The liberal pageant is fading, yet liberals find it hard to get by without believing they are on what they like to think is the right side of history.

John Guy, 'The closing of the liberal mind', New Statesman article, 7 November 2016

Way back in the mists of time, when I was a callow A-level History student, I sat one of the more popular thematic papers entitled ‘The Development of Democracy in Britain 1867-1997’. The title spoke volumes for the instinctive certainties that my generation absorbed as we grew up. Despite its imperfections, liberal democracy was a continually evolving and expanding process, and its ultimate destiny was to ensure that people of every social class, nationality, gender, race and sexual orientation would have full rights to prosperity, self-expression and self-determination. There would be bumps in the road, of course, and sometimes media distortion or the actions of extremists might succeed in setting the timetable back a few decades. But the ultimate trend was benevolent, and inexorable.

They don’t run the ‘Development of Democracy’ course any more. Such fairy stories were fine for the turn of the millennium, when even the shocks of 9/11 and 7/7 failed to dent the belief in the fundamental unity and moral superiority of western civilisation, but there is no room for complacency now.  The liberal illusions cherished by millennials and middle-aged academics alike in the post-Cold war era have been shattered by a succession of democratic revolts. Blinking in the half-light, we sense an unfamiliar and uncomfortable truth: where once they sat snugly together, ‘liberalism’ and ‘democracy’ are now an antithesis: in 2016, it would seem that we can be liberals or democrats, but not both.

It was Francis Fukuyama who gave us our postmodern itch about the ‘End of History’ and the rise of liberal democracy.  Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, an increasingly inter-connected and politically aligned world order seemed to be heading in only one direction: towards parliamentary systems modelled on Anglo-American lines, in which the promotion of trade, the rule of law, freedom of speech and the protection of minorities would be of paramount importance. Fukuyama did not claim that such a world would emerge immediately, or that there would not be some diversions along the way, and the importance of his analysis is evident from the way it has lingered in our collective psyche. Is there a more characteristically modern assumption than the idea that illiberal people are simply those who have not yet been given the right kind of education? The concept of the ‘End of History’ resonated strongly on the liberal left, but also posed a peculiar challenge. Along with the collapse of the Soviet Union had vanished any prospect of proposing a realistic alternative to free markets and unfettered capitalism. At best, campaigners for workers’ rights could target modest improvements in wages or employment rights as a reward for their efforts; the promise of a workers’ paradise was gone. What, then, would provide the loftier vision to which the twenty-first century liberal could aspire?

The answer has come in the flowering of identity politics, which is now the dominant and unifying cause of the international left. Ridding the world of racism, sexism and homophobia is a cause that is demanding, morally serious and necessary. But it is an agenda that has regenerated the forces that now seek to destroy liberal politics for good. Unapologetically illiberal politicians now pose as the champions of those left behind by economic change and abandoned by their former representatives. To an extent, this backlash can be justly represented as the disappointed rage of an army of white men, who have found to their frustration that their automatic superiority over others can no longer be taken for granted. But it should also be recognised that identity politics can often appear to be little more than demonstrative moral posturing with placards and hashtags: #BlackLivesMatter, #RhodesMustFall, #EverydaySexism, #RefugeesWelcome. No argument is actually being won, and few minds are being changed. Indeed, for all their apparent embrace of diversity and pluralism, the liberal left can at times appear decidedly narrow-minded. For who was it who argued that anti-abortion speakers and ‘transphobic’ feminists should be no-platformed on university campuses? Who called for the prosecution of bakers who refused to make cakes for gay couples? Who decided that every opponent of unrestricted migration was either a racist, or a charlatan? The likes of Trump and Farage are not the opposite of these modern zealots but their mirror image. All reduce complex issues to the level of simplistic slogans, creating a political world populated solely by heroes and villains. The groups of people energised by the ‘new right’ are the ones who have already lost their illusions about liberal democracy: economic  prosperity has dried up, and their political champions have found new more morally satisfying causes. Liberals no longer care what they think, unless it is to snigger at them for displaying national pride or for exhibiting low-brow cultural tastes; they have repaid us in kind.

Once upon a time, when guilty liberals like me were nourished by the confident certainty that our democracy would last forever, such contradictions and tensions didn’t seem to matter very much. We could ignore and even mock the Putins and the Erdogans, for what could be expected from simple people stumbling awkwardly towards their liberal and democratic destiny?  It is therefore with some degree of shock that we confront the possibility that Russia and Turkey might prove to be a decade or two ahead of us on the unrelenting path towards illiberal democracy.

Dad: A Eulogy

‘I want us to be doing things, prolonging life’s duties as much as we can. Let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him and still more of my gardens not being finished.’

Michel de Montaigne, Essay XIX: That To Study Philosophy Is To Learn To Die

Growing up with dad was a world without straight lines. Intellectual worlds and academic disciplines fused, merged and overlapped; time bent round corners; an average conversation included, in no particular order, the acceleration of the universe, the extinction of the dinosaurs, Greek myths and Neolithic man. As dad’s passenger on this meandering journey through time, I usually resolved simply to take a warm coat and enjoy the scenery, since there was no guarantee of arriving at any particular destination. Whereas my mum tended to hurtle straight towards the next imminent event, dad’s existence took the form of a parabolic curve that approached and passed away from a straight line, without ever quite touching it. Everything was a ‘project’: a work in progress, and the interest was to be found in the activity rather than the outcome. I can remember sitting with him as a little boy in his shed in Lacock, watching him carve and sculpt wooden figurines. Whilst I played with his tools, he worked methodically on each piece. If I admired one, he would delight in telling me what insignificant, pointless tat it was, which understandably I tended to find rather confusing. How could an object on whose creation he had laboured so intently possess such little intrinsic worth? The artefact from which he derived the greatest pleasure was his Lira da Braccio, made in 1999 as part of an MA course. This was my dad’s ultimate labour of love, but if you tried to ask him about the instrument itself, you would not detain him very long: the strings were bought at such-and-such a place, dirt cheap. The wood was bog standard, and the instrument could be mass produced without compromising its artistic value one bit. Ah, but the discovery and the making of it, that was the joy: the process of re-imagining the instrument from a medieval painting and researching its origins and design; the hard work of fitting strings to bridge, and bridge to board, and all together, of tuning it and finding a suitable bow, all in pursuit of nothing less than the perfect sound; that was a worthwhile subject. Get him on that, and he would be gone for hours, in search of the ‘music of the spheres’, via Ptolemy, Leonardo da Vinci and unnamed musical prodigies in the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan.

Dad knew instinctively that all the important things in life were the result of collaboration. Progress was the fruit of the efforts of many enthusiasts, often working as individuals but sharing a collective goal. He loved discussing the so-called ‘great men’ of history, but try as he might, he could never quite persuade himself that change was really directed by a few lone, titanic figures. Instead, dad’s natural irreverence got the better of him: he liked nothing more than to find the truly human aspect of key figures in history, and discover their true motivations, how far they succeeded, and what they sacrificed in the process. In studying politics and history, Dad relished the banality and folly of rulers who presented themselves as ‘god’s representatives on earth’. I can still recall him shaking with laughter at Charles Dickens’ two-page rant about the snivellingly useless James I, dribbling, fawning and snoring his way around his lavish and luxurious court, wearing a padded jacket because he was terrified of being stabbed by one of his supposedly adoring subjects. Similarly when he spoke about the lives of great artists and musicians that he admired, dad would explain to me that genius and creativity was often the product of ambition, carelessness, greed, or simple accident. Nothing delighted him more than the fact that the Renaissance was nurtured at the corrupt and highly dangerous court of the Medicis in Florence: It was a very human paradox that fascinated and entertained him throughout his life.

Unpretentious and irreverent, dad was the ideal conversation partner. His kindness and integrity invited honesty. If you told him that you found his ‘theory of everything’ unconvincing, he would laugh his head off, relishing the irony that a supposedly holistic theory to explain the workings of the universe was not in itself universal, but particular to his own way of seeing the world. 'There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’. Dad loved studying the worlds of scientific endeavour and intellectual progress, but, Hamlet-like, he also viewed human activity in the wider context of a universe without a beginning or an end. The particles of dust that form the temporary you and me will endure when our physical presence has long gone; death itself, in this context, loses its sting, and becomes a curiosity. It would have warmed Montaigne’s heart to see the old man in his chair, thinking seriously about who he was and where he was bound. Death became dad's last great theme, his final journey. Shortly after he died, I had a dream about him that revisited a familiar scenario from my childhood. I was sat in the back of the car, on the driver’s side, directly behind my dad. He was in full swing, holding forth on one of his universal theories about life, the universe and everything. Eventually, I had no choice but to interrupt him with a suitably blunt question: ‘Dad, aren’t you dead?’ Predictably, he found this possibility very amusing. ‘You tell me, sir’. A wry smile. ‘Isn’t this interesting?’, and before I knew it, he was off again, in pursuit of the nature of existence, the possibility of immortality, and the whereabouts of the human soul. Sensing that he could wax on this theme for a while, I once more felt obliged to cut to the chase. ‘You are gone, dad, and I am swamped with guilt, regret, pain and fear. What should I do?’ And then one of those real smiles, beyond reassurance, beyond love. A smile that made waking up seem like the next step, rather than an irrevocable loss.

What was important to dad was the stuff you couldn’t fake: a love of knowledge for its own sake and a willingness to wander over uncertain ground. He said: ‘It’s a pinball world out there; follow the head, the heart and the hands’. I could live to be a hundred years old and never receive better advice. Life, in all its baffling complexity and heart-breaking simplicity, is to be lived. Relish the sheer strangeness of it, the implausibility of the whole set-up, the miracle that you are you and he was he, and for a little while, your worlds approached one another like the parabola and the un-intersected line. In Hillsborough, someone watched dad as he crossed the town's main road, his slow and determined plod baffling local pedestrians and infuriating motorists. ‘His little feet were going, and wherever he was going, that was where he was going’. Slow as he was, you couldn’t catch him if you tried.

‘This above all, to thine own self be true’. They will ask me: What was the journey like? Why did it matter? Where did it lead? Will you walk with him again? I will answer: he was a man of enduring patience, curiosity and kindness, and such things are not so easily buried.

How much longer do I have left? That is the question. I could stay here for all time, and recount to you what my dad has meant to Lizzie and I, what we will miss, and what we will pass on. During his final visit, we both took the opportunity to tell him ourselves. This man who has gone, of such dignity, and courage, and compassion and integrity; I will find him in the curves, in the uncertainties of life: his is the voice that says: ‘don’t give up trying to understand who you are’. Know thyself. I have a few seconds left… and the curve of the parabola begins its slow onward journey away from the line it almost touched. So near, yet so far. ‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot’.

JOSEPH MATHIESON SKEAPING

1942 - 2016

A Prescription for Cynicism

I recently had occasion to advise an old university friend to take up bird-watching as a matter of urgency. Now, I am no dabbler in ornithology myself, you understand. But his need seemed acute. The guy had a serious case of the Trumps, and this was the only remedy that came to mind. The affliction appears in various forms, but the signs in my friend were evident from a long Facebook post, which can be summarised as follows: ‘I don’t trust politicians. They lie, make false promises, deceive and manipulate people, and they will do whatever it takes to advance their own careers.’

Lots of people seem to share this view, hence the attraction of so-called ‘anti-politics’. But to me it is one of the most inaccurate and corrosive ideas around, and I’ll give you two good reasons why:

1.     My friend’s view presents a classic example of what ought to be called ‘the politician’s fallacy’. You see, the thing about politicians is we tend to hear a lot about them, especially when they are accused of deception or unbridled ambition. Naturally, therefore, we make the assumption that these are the defining characteristics of the breed, whereas in truth they are simply the characteristics that we are most interested in. By contrast, the vices, contradictions and faults of most people are likely to be just as prevalent, but are obviously less newsworthy, and so it becomes possible to believe that politicians are some kind of breed apart. However, once you recognise that the working lives of most politicians are not particularly newsworthy, a different and much more optimistic view of the whole political process emerges. Hands up if you had heard of Jo Cox MP before 20 June 2016? Me, neither. Maybe my friend thinks she was a rotten apple too, but all the evidence I could find suggested that she was a diligent, engaged and popular local MP, and would have gone on being so. I think there are a good grounds to suppose that she was not especially uncommon in this regard.

2.     The belief that ‘all politicians are liars’ is a counsel of despair that is likely to cause people to reject the possibility that politics can make their lives better. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: if politics makes no difference, who will seek political solutions to their problems? And this, of course, is where things get dangerous. In every democracy around the world, there are ‘maverick’ politicians who relentlessly push the argument that all ‘mainstream’ politicians will do and say whatever it takes to advance their careers, and aren’t interested in public service. They can therefore make a virtue of saying and doing outrageous things, precisely because other politicians won’t. This not only tends to encourage divisive and inflammatory political rhetoric to gain traction, but also enables the ‘maverick’ to get a relatively easy ride. As long as they continue to defy convention, they will be forgiven by their supporters for making unrealistic promises, abusing their opponents and ineffective leadership. In short, a generally cynical attitude towards the political class will not encourage higher standards amongst politicians, but instead helps to lower the bar for leaders who are high on charisma but low on substance.

Here’s the thing that I really don’t understand. My friend is not politically apathetic or disengaged: in fact he posts regularly about politics, often commenting on the faults and flaws of various candidates and parties. So, what I want to know is: why? If he thinks that pretty much all politicians are dangerously manipulative and deceitful, then surely the whole process of following it can only be a stressful and frustrating one, with little hope of achieving any meaningful change.
The best prescription for cynicism of this kind is to study History. Not the kind which uses the past as a stick with which to bludgeon the present, but the kind that humanises politicians, acknowledges both great achievements and fatal flaws and reminds us that, whilst calculation and compromise are intrinsic to politics, it isn’t the whole story: crooked methods have often facilitated vital progress. Daniel Finkelstein’s analysis of recent British Prime Ministers provides a perfect illustration:

'Lloyd George, bounder and opportunist or great radical leader? Bonar Law, unimaginative minnow or great war leader? The Duke of Newcastle, old fool or master of the patronage system? Both, both, both. The idea that there are simple heroes and villains collapses under the weight of evidence. As does the idea that politicians were so much better in the past. No, they weren’t. They were less experienced, less in touch, less broad-minded and less accountable. We are much better served now.'

I agree. Today’s politicians are more open-minded and more collaborative than those of previous generations. If you are one of those who sneer at the ‘political class’ and condemn the ‘mainstream media’, you are simply repeating a charge that has been made throughout history, at a time when it has never been less justified. You also leaving yourself with an unpalatable choice: despairing cynicism, or blind faith in a single leader who promises to sweep away corruption and put an end to ‘politics as usual’. Either way, history has a lesson for you too.

But, perhaps, like my friend, you just need a break from the Twitterstorms and the social media frenzies. A spot of bird-watching to remind you that, in life as in politics, beauty and darkness are intertwined.

Where will it end? Maximilen Robespierre and the politics of purity

Political purity, in any form, is both impossible and undesirable. People who put their faith in an individual or an ideology that promises to remedy all evils and achieve an ideal society, are not only setting themselves up for a disappointment, they are also guilty of a form of moral blindness, which prevents them from seeing either the good in their political opponents or the weaknesses in their own side.

"Maximilien was once a … child, and when children become adults they do not grow into saints and devils, but into men and women."

(Peter McPhee, biographer of Robespierre)

The political career of Maximilien Robespierre, one of the most important and divisive figures of the French Revolution,  provides a powerful illustration of the destructive effect of the politics of purity. Over the course of five years, Robespierre went from advocating freedom of speech, defending minority rights, and promoting the cause of peace, to supporting the death penalty for political opponents, removing due process of law in political trials and successfully silencing and destroying former political allies. The closer he came to believing that France required ‘purification’ in order to revive a lost spirit of civic virtue, the more he became, in McPhee's words, "prone to understanding the revolutionary world in terms of a binary opposition: the good and the evil, ‘patriots’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’".

"This man will go far: he believes everything he says."

(Mirabeau on Robespierre)

However, Robespierre’s early political career provided little indication of his later willingness to act ruthlessly in pursuit of his ideals. A man of austere habits and strongly-held principles, Robespierre was no spittle-flecked ranter; instead, his oratorical style was measured and sincere. Before he was drawn in to the maelstrom of Parisian politics, he had been a relatively unknown provincial lawyer, and this enabled him to present himself as an independent-minded and impartial voice above the political fray. This gave weight to Robespierre’s claim to speak on behalf of the ordinary people of France, rather than gilded members of the aristocracy, clergy or bourgeoisie. Robespierre’s most celebrated early speeches to the National Assembly attacked privilege, upheld freedom of conscience and attacked the compromises made by the revolution’s self-appointed leaders. He criticised the death penalty and, later, the drive for war against the external enemies of the revolution.

"In the midst of corruption, you have remained the unshakeable support of truth... you have fought to maintain the purity of a constitution dictated by philosophy for the good of humankind."

(Speech in praise of Robespierre)

Robespierre’s idealism was founded above all on the work of two great writers, Rousseau and Plutarch, who attacked the corruption around them by sanctifying an earlier, purer society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that human society had once been based on virtue and brotherhood, but these principles had been eroded by the pursuit of ambition and material wealth. Centuries earlier, the Roman historian Plutarch praised the courageous and self-sacrificing defenders of liberty who had struck down internal enemies and would-be tyrants in order to preserve the Roman Republic. As the political crises facing the revolutionary state deepened between 1792 and 1794, Robespierre used speech after speech to set forth this vision of purer, ennobled society that would truly meet the high-minded aspirations of 1789. To his supporters, he became ‘L’incorruptible’ – the deputy who could not be swayed by calls for calculation or compromise.

"Citizens, there is too much reason to believe that the Revolution, like Saturn, will progressively devour all of its children…"

(Pierre Vergniaud, speech to the National Convention, January 1793)

But almost from the moment that Robespierre began to articulate this powerful vision, he and his supporters were faced with a nagging problem. Purification is an all-encompassing process; half-measures are impossible, and there is no place for small doubts or sceptical analysis. If Robespierre was the courageous truth-teller who was liberating France, any challenge was seen as a fundamental attack on his integrity, and therefore of the revolution as a whole. Cautious, detached critics who warned about the radical pace of change were no better than the most ardent conservatives, indeed they were in practice worse, since they disguised themselves as radicals only in order to prevent a true transformation from taking place, and thus to protect their own positions. As the revolution radicalised, so the apparent conspiracy worsened; more of Robespierre’s former colleagues and allies expressed doubts and urged caution. All traitors, all hypocrites, all, one by one, destined for the scaffold.

"He has all the characteristics, not of a religious leader, but of the leader of a sect."

(Condorcet on Robespierre)

You do not have to search far to find the same kind of political dynamic working itself out in contemporary politics (even if most of the violence is now online). The champions of ‘anti-politics’ are, in one form or another, descendants of Robespierre: not all are great orators, nor as austere, nor as astute, but all claim to speak on behalf of the marginalised and ignored, envisaging a society in which the corruption can be defeated by the force of their idealism. Their devoted supporters will seize on the merest scraps of evidence to legitimise their political programme, and use personal insults or violent rhetoric to trash anyone who challenges them. The purification of politics ensures that there can be no compromise with the status quo and no room for doubt. Complex questions are simplified into a binary choice, and those on the wrong side of the debate are vilified and purged.

In the end, the trouble with the politics of purity is that everyone ends up covered in filth.

The Strange Success of the British Labour Party

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice

(If you seek [a] memorial, look around you)

Crisis? What crisis?

(Headline in the The Sun, 11 January 1979)

Amidst all the anguish over the fate of the British Labour Party in recent weeks, something simple has been missed: the party's internal crises are the result of unheralded success. Since it came into being at the start of the twentieth century, the Labour Party has, through a combination of political pressure and direct legislation, made a major contribution to transforming the lives of the British working class. At the time of its foundation in 1900, the reports of Booth and Rowntree documented appalling conditions in impoverished communities from London to York, with lives blighted by insanitary housing, poor education and prejudice. Labour gave a voice to exploited miners, machine operators and matchgirls, and helped to transform their social and economic conditions.

Bob Dylan put it best when he sang: ‘there’s no success like failure’. For all the political setbacks along the way, the Labour Party has arguably been the most influential force in modern British politics. It is true, of course, that the Conservative Party has won more post-war elections, but it was the Labour Government led by Clement Attlee that established the post-war consensus with sweeping reforms between 1945-51, and it was only by changing itself unrecognisably that the Conservative Party was able to flourish as an electoral force. From the housebuilding programme of the 1950s to the ‘Tell Sid’ revolution of the 1980s, successive Conservative governments have sought to park themselves on the turf of the Labour Party to achieve electoral success. Modern Tories are no different: since 2010, for example, David Cameron’s government has protected the NHS budget, reduced the tax burden on the low paid, raised the minimum wage and introduced gay marriage. Under Theresa May, they are now publicly committed to a programme that has more in common with Labour’s 2015 manifesto than with their own.

The battle of the Labour Party to define itself in 2016 thus results from its success in setting the political agenda. Every Labour government since 1945 (including Attlee’s) has been accused of betraying the working class, and every opposing party has attempted to colonise their political programme: at present, the Conservatives, the SNP and, of course, UKIP have moved on to ‘Labour’ territory by arguing that they are the real defenders of the interests of the working class. In this context, it is not especially surprising that Labour Party members prefer to strike out into less familiar waters, providing clearer definition against their imitators. Critics argue that such a move threatens to break the dynamic that has been the secret to Labour’s success: if Labour is seen to be unelectable, not only can it not govern, but it cannot even maintain adequate pressure on the government. Labour would be returning not to the glory days of the Attlee administration, but to the wilderness years of the 1930s.

A final thought: one thing that all Labour activists share is a hopeful vision of what the future can bring. At times, however, this can be mixed with an all-too-pessimistic view of the present, and a relentless search for the victims of government policy. When referring to disadvantaged groups, a Shadow Cabinet minister recently included ‘women’ as one such group. Another Labour councillor took a sideswipe at government policy by angrily referring to the  creation of the ‘northern poorhouse’. Tory cabinet ministers have been sacked for less. If the Labour Party ceases to believe in its own success over the past century, then it may be on the brink of experiencing what failure really means.

Are you sitting comfortably?

'People don't like their politicians to be comfortable. They don't like you having expenses, they don't like you being paid, they would rather you lived in a fucking cave.'
Malcolm Tucker, The Thick of It; Season 3 Episode 1

Olivia: Take the fool away.

Fool: Do you not hear, fellows? Take away the lady.
Twelfth Night, I.5.330-331

Four hundred years on from Shakespeare’s death, and his Fool is still following us around. He jabbers away in the background, delving into our doubts, internal contradictions and secret vices. He does not intend to be demeaning, simply to keep us on the straight and narrow, and remind us that as well as being ‘infinite in faculty’, we are human, frail and not exempt from the general rules of the species. However, it does get exhausting after a while, so, like Olivia, we will be tempted to dismiss the Fool. Much easier to listen to shallower voices, offering the kind of satirical voice that comforts us and strengthens our preconceptions, rather than forcing us to engage with any shades of grey.

Happily, we know where to find these voices. They belong to the commentators whose views we already agree with, and whose stock in trade is to imitate the satirist’s cutting edge, but to turn the blade away from the reader and towards a target that can be comfortably identified as the enemy. Frankie Boyle’s most recent diatribe against a cabinet minister is a vivid portrayal of a wider genre: when he asserts that the minister is ‘so overtly ridiculous that he might be best thought of as a sort of rodeo clown, put there simply there to distract the enraged public’, he reveals an unwitting truth. Boyle’s writing is the satire of the playground bully. He closes down debate and sets up his dehumanised enemy as an object for hatred and ridicule, denying legitimacy to those who disagree. It is comforting for those in the hate mob, of course, but that doesn’t make it satirical, just as a book of cartoons depicting a religious prophet are not satirical merely because they cause offence. Instead the message is the opposite of satire: you are right, and they are wrong. Don’t think, don’t question, don’t investigate further. Just know your enemy, and hate them, and be comfortable.

The Fool gives us a much harder time. Shakespeare did not write for a mutual appreciation society, but for as diverse an audience as can be imagined. As a consequence, no one escapes ridicule. In Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Jan Kott writes: ‘The Fool does not follow any ideology. He rejects all appearances, of law, justice, moral order. He sees brute force, cruelty and lust. He has no illusions and does not seek consolation in the existence of natural or supernatural order, which provides for the punishment of evil and the reward of good.’ However comforting it may be to believe in good guys and bad guys, the Fool will not let us off so lightly. He disrupts the illusions of beggars, kings, tradesmen, sexual adventurers, clergymen, aristocrats, democrats and players alike. His genius is to make us laugh at ourselves, which is the most liberating laughter of all.

Satire of this calibre is not only found in Shakespeare. In the contemporary political comedy series The Thick of It, the foul-mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker monopolises the laughs. But the joke is on us. When Tucker bullies politicians and civil servants, he does so on our behalf. Since we demand sanitised and simplistic political messages, he is employed to provide them. So when we laugh at Malcolm Tucker, we laugh at our own folly. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the contradictions are still more acute. Malvolio, the pompous steward, is brought low in a plot orchestrated by the Fool himself, in which the audience are invited to be co-conspirators. We laugh along as Malvolio is declared to be mad, imprisoned in a dark cell, whilst his protests are ignored and his humanity rejected. By the time we realise what has occurred, it is too late. Malvolio is beyond conciliation: ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you’, he shouts, and this time the laughter catches in our throats. And a four hundred year old voice asks, who is the fool now?

Nightfall, Berlin

"Dass war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."

"That was only a prelude; where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people."

Heinrich Heine, 1821[1]

September 2005: I am alone, walking around a huge, open-air urban museum, with darkness descending and cold setting in. Berlin has been re-built in the years after the wall, and I am visiting the city for the first time and expecting to find it cold and clinical, a city that has covered over the traces of its disturbed past. Instead, there are fissures and cracks everywhere; the job is only half-complete, and no one seems to mind. In the daytime, the reconstructed German parliament building looked imposing, a projection of the brash confidence of this reborn country. At night, in the eerie quiet of the almost deserted city centre, it looks faded and fragile. There is hardly anybody around.

August 1914: Kaiser Wilhelm stands on the balcony of the royal palace, announcing that Germany is now at war. The cheering crowd stretches all the way back to the Brandenburg Gate, over a kilometre away. The kaiser tells them: ‘Ich kenne keine Parteien mehr, ich kenne nur noch Deutsche!’ Only Germans… These words echo through the years that follow. The Germans have a mystical sense of their collective power, the result of many centuries of division and weakness. Leaders that have been able to unify them, have also achieved great victories against overwhelming odds: Charlemagne, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck. For the first time, the Great War unites the German and Austrian empires against a motley alliance of France, Russia and Britain. But now the story goes wrong. Four years of bloody sacrifice end in retreat, starvation and humiliating surrender. The search is on for a scapegoat to prove that collective German power was not really defeated, but betrayed by an enemy within.

January 2016: I teach my students that the German Jews were persecuted under the Third Reich for historical reasons, to do with Christian belief, legal discrimination and patterns of migration. But they were also simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.  In Germany, the Jews are concentrated in sufficient numbers to provide a credible scapegoat, but not enough to be able to organise collective resistance. I ask my classes to estimate the percentage of the German population that identified as Jewish in 1933. They always guess somewhere between 15 and 40%. The true figure is smaller than 1%.

May 1933: The revolution has begun, and the time has come to purify German culture, eliminating all ‘undesirable’ reminders of a corrupted past. In Berlin, the purification is led not by the Nazi high command, but by enthusiastic young students, who raid their university library and remove any examples they can find of ‘decadent’, ‘un-German’ literature. The books are thrown onto a huge bonfire in the open square outside, whilst a crowd of about 40,000 cheer and sing patriotic songs. Goebbels is present to give a brief speech: He tells the students – ‘you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed’. It is raining.


September 2005: It’s getting really dark now, and I am starting to get lost. I have walked through the Holocaust Memorial, and back up to the site of the old royal palace. The Bebelplatz, where the book burning took place, is a hundred yards away. On the other side of the bridge stand the city’s museums, huddled together in solidarity, wounds tightly bound. I sense a crowd gathering behind me. They would like to apologise, to explain, to undo, but are silenced by the vivid evidence of their own destructive power. What’s done is done. I turn around. There is no-one there.

November 1938: Kristallnacht – 'the night of broken glass'. All over Germany, synagogues are attacked and many are burnt to the ground. Jewish shops and property are ransacked, and some Jews are killed. In some cases, locals and police intervene to prevent violence. Some join in, encouraged by anti-Semitic propaganda, opportunism, or a combination of the two. The vast majority, however, are silent observers, either in the streets or from behind their living room curtains. Later, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, ascribes the violence to the ‘healthy instincts’ of the German people. However, the government is inundated with reports that the public are less supportive than expected, with some expressing anger at the extreme measures taken. Hitler bans further reporting of the events of Kristallnacht in the national press. The Jewish population are made to pay the costs of repairing the damage: a total of one billion Reichsmarks.

June 2015: When you peer inside the memorial at the Bebelplatz, squinting to see the rows of empty shelves, it is just possible that you catch a glimpse of your reflection on the glass panel below you. The architect has a subtle message here: we ourselves are no different from those who burned books and buildings, or stepped aside to allow the destruction of an entire race living in the heart of civilised Europe. But on a summer’s day in Berlin, the warning is easy to miss. The city shines with a new optimistic glow – it is ten years since my first visit, and in the intervening years Germany has grown in confidence and political clout. The city is still a museum, but the presentation is slick and more detached. Except at night, when the Berliners and the tourists clear out, and the ghosts are allowed to walk.

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[1] The quotation appears next to the installation by Micha Ullman, below. Heine was a German Jew, writing about the destruction during the Spanish Inquisition. His  works were amongst those burned in Berlin on 10 May 1933.

Micha Ullman's memorial to the book burning in the Bebelplatz.
 

A Part of the Main? Britain's Relationship with Europe

'No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main’

John Donne, Meditation XVII

Nobody delivers the rhetoric of ‘our island story’ better than David Cameron. Its heroes are many and varied: the signatories of the Magna Carta; William Shakespeare and John Milton, whose writings contributed to a rejuvenation of native identity and culture; Admiral Nelson, Winston Churchill, and all those captains of industry that forged the industrial revolution. All this achieved by a small island nation, and all because we ploughed an independent furrow, above petty European squabbles. However, as a new year dawns, the Prime Minister is sparing no effort to secure the concessions from his European counterparts that will enable him to campaign for Britain to remain in the European Union in 2016. Why is Cameron, an avowed patriot but otherwise a politician with few discernible ideological principles, going to such lengths to secure a deal that will keep Britain in the EU?

There are a couple of different explanations available. For those who wish to leave, Cameron’s approach looks treacherous; like so many generations of politicians before him, he appears to have been ‘bought’ by Brussels, and is now desperately attempting to deceive the British people into voting to remain in the EU, against their better judgement. Polls certainly show significant hostility in Britain to certain aspects of the European project, especially unrestricted migration and perceived interference with our national laws and customs. Nevertheless, I think our attitudes to Europe are more complex. The majority of people seem to (grudgingly) accept that British interests demand close economic and political ties with our near neighbours. From this perspective, David Cameron can be seen as providing a useful public service: the illusion of renegotiation will provide reassurance on the issues that people are concerned about, providing them with an excuse to be able to vote with their heads rather than their hearts.

So why do we need the excuse? The answer is that we are still in love with a Sinatra-like sense of our own exceptionalism. The story goes back a long way: 950 years ago this month, the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold Godwinson, was crowned: his doomed but heroic defence against the Norman invasion ten months later is still a source of inspiration for nationalists. Since then, other moments of defiant resistance have joined the historical narrative that celebrates England’s independence and self-reliance. If the narrative could be summed it an image, it would surely be that of Elizabeth I’s Armada portrait of 1588. As the battle rages around her, the queen sits confidently and defiantly alone, vindicated by the victory of the English fleet over the Spanish invaders, her finger pointing towards colonial ambitions to the New World.

The Armada Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, c.1588.
George Gower. Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, UK.

We are not the only country that is in love with our own national myth (ask the French about liberté, egalité, fraternité), but a closer look suggests that, while art and literature may celebrate the iconography of isolationism and separatism, in reality we have never allowed ourselves to become detached or excluded from continental diplomacy. Even before the Norman Conquest, British rulers were vitally connected with the power struggles of mainland Europe. Harold Godwinson was half-Danish, and spent part of his life in rebellion against his half-Norman predecessor on the English throne, Edward the Confessor. Over the centuries, not much has changed. Far from being a moment of national vindication and triumph, the defeat of the Armada was in reality a short-lived success. Elizabeth I spent the next decade fighting an unglamorous and unheralded military campaign to prop up her Dutch and French allies in order to slowly wear down the Spanish forces. Another potent anniversary this year will be that of the Battle of the Somme, begun primarily to save the French army from annihilation at Verdun. Our island story is paradoxically European, and, while the British have traditionally celebrated our independence, we have tended to make foreign policy decisions that bind us to, rather than detach us from, mainland Europe.

Of course, all this may change in 2016. Expect a good deal of anguished wrestling between head and heart in the run-up to the referendum, and fluctuating opinion polls as a result. And expect the British people to decide, once again, that while Europe may be a problem, she is our problem too.